


The Stars I Abdicated

by nicasio_silang



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-19
Updated: 2016-01-19
Packaged: 2018-05-15 01:28:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5766706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicasio_silang/pseuds/nicasio_silang
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>FN-2187 is four years old when the Empire falls. The Republic never demilitarizes. The First Order never rises. But there will always be the war.</p><p> </p><p>  <i>Lights, lights in gold and green. Lights from somewhere high above that cut like curtains through the wide, dark space, that drape like knives and land solidly on a hundred-hundred moving bodies. Chrome, fur, teeth, and so much skin, strained and sweating. Youth, compressed: the children of the New Republic, the children of the lasting peace. Wealth and glamour and security, everything FN had been born to see and never touch. This is Coruscant aboveground. </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	The Stars I Abdicated

**Author's Note:**

> Big thanks to my squadron of betas: Pam, Nino, Sam, Emma, and Gretchen. 
> 
> I've heavily fudged the timeline and character ages here. For the purposes of the AU, Finn is age 4 at the time of the Battle of Endor, and Poe about 12.
> 
> If you're so inclined, check out the [soundtrack](http://8tracks.com/gabbysilang/the-stars-i-abdicated).

_Come back, massive oaks that await our coming;_  
 _to carve initials is to be truly human;_  
 _the days are dappled with our passions,_  
 _the mountains rise and fall with our glories and follies._  
 _-_ Rachel Wetzsteon

 

Lights, lights in gold and green. Lights from somewhere high above that cut like curtains through the wide, dark space, that drape like knives and land solidly on a hundred-hundred moving bodies. Chrome, fur, teeth, and so much skin, strained and sweating. Youth, compressed: the children of the New Republic, the children of the lasting peace. Wealth and glamour and security, everything FN had been born to see and never touch. This is Coruscant aboveground.

It’s his fourth night stalking this floor. The first, the second, he was insoluble in the crowd. They looked and they knew. A lifetime of eyes sliding off him like mercury slick off a tabletop gave him a sense of when he’d been recognized for what he was. But despite everything, he’s one of the lucky ones. He’s no clone. All it takes is a costume change, then one good night down, one trick behind him, and now he sinks right into the bending, thrashing thick of things.

A black tunic, cut to bare his chest. Sandals laced high in the new old style. Two lines shaved through his hair, and in the dark nobody’s likely to notice the shaky hand that did it. Naked arms, bright streaks of color above his eyes, and a smile. That, of all of it, is the unfashionable piece, but it’s something FN can’t stop or find it in himself to regret. It’s summer at the center of the galaxy, and it’s spinning around him in sound and color.

And the sound of it. FN can feel himself rocking to it like a banner in a breeze. The crowd is immense, but in the sound he’s cocooned alone. It feels like his first memories of childhood, nestled close to the massive engines of the creche ship, flesh and bones and bulkheads humming at the same all-encompassing frequency. More noise than music, more command than melody. He’s moved; he moves.

FN finds himself face to leonine face with a broad-shouldered Bothan. They sway into each other again and again. She’s grim, and half a head taller than he is, and even in the shifting light FN can see her regarding him with a hard detachment, as if he is so many cuts of meat. Her dress and her manner and the fact that she’s here says she has the money to follow through, but it’s early, FN just got here, and he lets himself forget, for a moment, what he’s doing. So he smiles and reaches up to stroke her beard, and when her eyes close at the sensation, he turns and slips through a gap in the crowd.

He slithers through the throng by sensation: his hands around the waist of a servo-studded mechpunk, his neck caressed in passing by a meaty, pale hand, his back pressed intimately to someone’s front, his fingertips under a gauzy shirt. A dizzying mass of twists and swivels until suddenly there’s something in front of him that he’s never seen before in his life. The horizon.

Windows on Coruscant are an ostentatious display of wealth. They mean not only that you’re above the surface, but that you’re at an outer wall, at a height where the air is clean enough to see through. In a neighborhood where the factory floors stretch the length of a city, and in a city that has sprawled to cover an entire planet, it’s easy, it’s common, to go a lifetime never seeing the skyline, or touching a wall that touches the clear, high air. It’s dizzying to be here, to be able to see through the air as if there were nothing there at all.

FN, pressed by bodies on all sides but one, presses his palms flat to the glass.

The window stretches to the unseen ceiling, and away to the left and away to the right. People are dancing right next to it, not looking, like it’s nothing. FN’s breath steams against it, then contracts, a pulse of his life against the sight of the city.

He’s so high up. High enough that there’s a scattering of visible stars above. He knew it had taken a while to ride to this level, but he’d never imagined this. At least a mile up, among the spires of the over-city. Traffic is a silent grid far below at the midlevels. Spread even further down, the skirting of the spires, is CoCo Town. Almost too far down to see are the highest roofs of that heavy industry district that had been FN’s world since the Empire collapsed and left him with what scraps the New Republic’s pity would allow. He can make out the brutal shape of the coolant factory that had laid him off. Orphans of the Empire are assured work through the age of nineteen. FN-2187, twenty years old and discarded, has heard of only one way to get aboveground.

Gold light hits the glass just so, momentarily wiping out the city in a shattering blaze. FN rocks back on his heels from the vision.

Then, so fast he’s not sure it’s real, FN feels the window shudder. Out of time with the music, it shakes against his hands. It’s gone, then back. He looks left, then right, and sees the shape of a man being thrown into the glass. Logically, he knows that there are few things powerful enough to shatter the grade of glass that must be used in this room, and he knows as well that whatever’s happening is far from his business, but his feet don’t know it, and he’s off and running with his shoulder to the window. He shouts a word that’s immediately lost to the greater sound around him. He shoves around a serving droid, and steps into the small space the crowd has absented to allow for the fight.

It’s three on one. Two humans or near-humans and a towering vratix form a blockade between FN, the window, and the wider room. They react to his entrance with sneers. The vratix holds a man in white by the back of the neck between her mandibles. FN gestures at her to drop him. She tosses him at FN’s feet, and then it’s three on two. The injured man stands, bends in two, visibly coughs, and spits. FN wraps a hand around his shoulder and moves to stand in front of him, to warn off his attackers.

But this would-be-rescuee notices FN’s hand on him, glances up through a fan of black hair, and looses a smile that stops FN in his tracks. It’s mischief and guts and ego. It’s an invitation to trouble. There’s no choice in his response at all. He grins. They stand together. FN steps ahead of the injured man, brings his fists up. His new acquaintance shouts something in a language he can barely hear, and can’t at all understand. Their opponents don’t like it. One of the humans wipes her bloodied knuckles across her chin and bares her teeth. FN swings at her first.

He’s on his back in a blink, kicking out as viciously as he can, connecting with someone’s leg that gives a little, then gives more abruptly to the sound of a scream. The man in white is going at it with the vratix again, the other human tending to his injured comrade. The vratix lashes out with her spined leg, but the crush of the crowd constrains her movement and the man ducks around her strike to grab her tibia in both hands and fall with all his weight forward, twisting the joint backwards. Her antennae go wild, she tosses her head. FN rises from the floor. Blood falls from his brow to his cheek. The crowd has barely registered them. They’re dancing, dancing, touching, moving. The lights rotate above them and run sunshine across the man in white’s eyes, the line of his jaw, the flash of his bloody smile. And FN, like anyone who’s seen a holo in the last twenty years, recognizes him.

“Shit,” FN says. Nobody can hear him. “Shit!” He says. Poe Dameron grabs his hand and takes off running across the dancefloor, the injured vratix crashing after them.

 

Through the crowd, behind the bar, out of the lights and down a narrow hall. Through four doors, past a six-legged Quermian who brushes FN’s mind with its own in curiosity and gives a chittering chuckle at what it finds there. Around a corner and into a cargo elevator lit in deep red. Dameron slaps the controls and the door slides shut top to bottom. Close by, the cut-off wail of the vratix. They descend.

“Are you okay?” FN asks between gulping breaths. He paces the small space, still feeling the call to run.

“Good, yeah. Hey, what floor are you parked at?” Poe hovers at the control panel.

“I’m not.”

“Yeah, me neither,” says Poe. “Suspended my license again. We’ll have to hire a ride at the mids.”

“We will?” FN says, emphasis on the _we_.

Poe turns around from the panel, half-collapsing back onto the elevator wall. He’s waggle-kneed, loose-hipped, sloe-eyed. He pushes himself up by the backs of his shoulders and curves to standing. He takes in the sight of FN and seems to find him a curiosity, something FN is used to and bristles at; he seems to find him an unlooked-for delight, something FN isn’t sure what to do with.

Poe says, “All those heroics, and you don’t think I’d take you home to thank you?”

“Oh. Oh, I don’t think you want to go to my neighborhood,” FN says. Poe smiles from one end of his face to the other. He plants his hands on his hips.

“I meant my home.”

“Oh. Oh! You’re hiring me. That’s, sure, of course you are. Of course you are! Of course you are, people like you hire me all the time.” With a force of will, FN stops talking.

“Don’t see why they wouldn’t,” Poe says. The elevator chimes. They’re halfway to their destination. “I’m Poe, by the way. Poe Dameron.” He doesn’t say _son of Rebellion luminaries_ , or _gravcar racing champ whose image is taped to the doors of lockers around the galaxy, FN’s included_ , but that’s implied. “What’s your name, kid?” Poe asks. And in a fit of trust, FN tells the truth.

“FN-2187.”

For most people, there’s a sliver of time where they don’t understand. They’d never met an Imperial orphan before, or they’d only seen clones and knew he didn’t have the face for one. Then it came to them: from a passing lesson in school, or a docu-holo they’d half-watched, or the hand-scrawled sign of a beggar passed every day, or the plea of a charity solicitation that had cut into their line of sight once on a commute, saying, _Taken as children, twice orphaned, never even given names._ Then, fast on the heels of recognition, comes the pity, then the dismissal. Poe skips over all these steps.

“Ugh, no,” he says.

“...What?”

“No, I’m not using that. I can’t believe this government, can you? They go to all the trouble to liberate you-”

“Liberate?”

“-and can’t even be bothered to give you actual names, or full citizenship, or decent jobs. No offense, if you like your job.”

“Honestly? I’ve had worse. Violence aside. Speaking of, why were those people trying to kill you?"

Poe shrugs, “Politics. I don’t think they would have killed me. Hey, how about Finn?”

“How? What?” FN feels, increasingly, the night spinning away from him.

“FN, right? What if I call you Finn? You okay with that?”

And in that moment, the spinning doesn’t so much stop, but finds a center. Here it is, the point on which he hinges. The cargo elevator door opens and the wild lights of traffic wash over them. Poe Dameron is all in quilted white brocade, gilded collar and cuffs. There’s blood on his brow, his chin, down his nose, but his clothes are pristine. He smiles right at FN. He looks so glad to see him here, as if he’d been expecting him, expecting this, expecting them. Above their heads, an advertisement ten levels tall: the grim profiles of Rey Skywalker and Ben Organa, and written in proud blue under them, _Claim Your Freedom_. A recruitment campaign for the preservation of the endless peace.

“I like that,” FN says. “Finn, yeah. I like that.”

 

 

It’s a corner suite. FN didn’t know the term for it. Poe had seen the head-spinning look on his face and explained the concept. Windows that meet where the walls kiss, a view that spears out into the skyline. Tactile architecture.

“Holy hell,” FN says, too loud. It’s just them in here in the spare, cream-and-gilt room. His voice falls heavy into the pristine space. He’s aware, suddenly, awkwardly, of his body as a messy object in an immaculate setting. The flat light reveals how cheap the stitching of his tunic is, how tacky the silver of his sandals. The fuzzy mirroring of the windows exaggerate how smudged his makeup has become. And it’s cold here, and he’s shaking a little.

By the door, Dameron toes off his shoes. He does something at the wall panel and soft music starts to play from the valachord in the corner. Something beat-heavy, something FN doesn’t recognize. It slips around the room, a relief. Poe goes to a side table, built to look like real wood, or maybe it is real wood.

“Offer you a drink?” Poe says. “Or you had enough for the night?”

“I can’t afford the drinks at that place,” FN throws over his shoulder, still entranced by the view.

“You go to those parties sober?” A soft laugh. “Now _that’s_ heroic.”

Poe steps between FN and the window and hands him a small, frosted glass of something dark and viscous. FN takes a sniff and reels back.

“Is this safe?” FN asks.

“Tastes better than it smells. Lothalian currant wine.” He smiles around the rim of his own glass. “You don’t have to try it if you don’t want to.”

In what’s becoming a worrying habit, FN returns the smile and follows where Poe’s going. He knocks back the drink in two deep swallows. It fights him going down, but leaves a taste on his tongue like flower petals, like fresh air. His eyes slip closed. The drink tunnels through him, hot and thick. Distantly, he feels his glass taken out of his fingers. He feels a warm hand lay flat on his stomach, right where the alcohol is hitting him, and the heat of that hand and the pull of the liquor curl into him. He rocks forward, back, forward. The breath of a laugh washes over the bare skin of his neck.

“Yeah,” Poe says. “I never did get to see you dance.”

“I don’t really know how,” FN says. His eyes still closed, he searches out Poe with his face. His lips and nose end up in Poe’s hair where he snuffles like a lost creature.

“There’s nothing much to it,” says Poe. His hands press to the front of FN’s hips, then pull, then press. FN finds Poe’s waist with his fingers, then the curve of his back. Poe’s lips ghost down the side of FN’s neck. “Tell me what you’re up for,” he says into the sweat at FN’s collarbone.

And FN, lost in the smell of Poe’s skin, the taste of the wine, in the dizzying height of this night, says, “It’s your money.” Then he’s being kissed.

It’s hardly his first kiss. Poe isn’t his first client. But the ache of it, the yearning towards the very thing he already has, the way he finds his hands coming up to frame Poe’s jaw, it’s heady and new. Poe’s kisses are soft and sliding, one into the next. His tongue comes out to trace Finn’s lips. He dances back to press the bridge of his nose to the angle of FN’s chin, chuckling.

“Well, damn.”

“Right?” says FN, a little giddy.

“Yeah.”

Poe’s mouth on his again, teeth out to scrape at FN, to drag across his bottom lip, to take that lip between his own and pull. Poe’s hands inside his tunic, pushing it aside so that FN’s naked to the waist. Poe’s hands everywhere: his chest, his belly, the dip of his spine, the curve of his ass, and the thrilling, growing pressure of his cock.

FN fumbles his fingers up to the catch at the collar of Poe’s jacket and tugs it open. The cords of Poe’s neck, the scent of the heat he’s putting off. FN works free the line of buttons quickly, bends and laps at the hollow at the bottom of Poe’s neck and feels his throat shudder from a laugh. They both work to shove Poe’s jacket off, and when it catches on his wrists, Poe says, “Wait.”

He steps back, just a breath away, but FN feels his body lean in at the loss. Poe does something behind his back that makes the muscles of his caught arms go taut. He drops to his knees and looks up at FN with a question in his smile.

So here’s his life, suddenly. He’s standing at the peak of the over-city, the midnight skyline spread before him like a vision of heaven, and kneeling at his feet is Poe Dameron, golden heir of the old Rebellion, mouth swollen from kisses, dark hair a wreck, shoulders strained, hands tied behind his back. Smiling up at FN like he’s the lucky one.

FN starts to push his pants down, but Poe tosses his head and says, “Let me.”

FN takes a step closer so that Poe can reach him, and Poe leans in, just right, his mouth landing under FN’s belly button, his teeth scraping down the line of hair that leads below the waist of his pants. Poe uses his mouth, he uses his nose, he burrows against FN’s stomach, into the groove of his hip bone. The scratch of fabric against his erection is excruciating. The sight and heat of Poe wrapping his mouth around FN’s cloth-trapped cock is excruciating. The revelation of a starscape of freckles across Poe’s broad shoulders is almost unbearable.

The swollen, sensitized head of his cock pushes free of his waistband and Poe is on it like a starving man. His cheek rough against FN’s stomach, his wide, hot mouth wrapped and suckling on him without preamble, pulling the full, heavy length of him free with the force of his enthusiasm. The flat of Poe’s tongue against the curve of his glans and FN can’t help it, he rocks his hips and looks down to see Poe’s cheek distended. FN hisses and stutters and Poe cranes his neck back, the tip of FN’s cock resting on his bottom lip, and he smiles, breathing hard.

_Tell me what you’re up for._

“I want you to touch me,” FN says in a voice he doesn’t recognize. Maybe it’s Finn’s voice.

Poe starts to struggle. Pulls his wrists, the cords of his neck and arms standing out in tension. His arms raise and his stomach folds. He loses hold of Finn in the process, and Finn helps him out: he falls forward and braces one arm against the window, uses his other hand to feed his cock back into Poe’s grasping mouth.

He slides, he slides down Poe’s open throat. Finn catches double vision. The lights of the city and the lights behind his eyes.

Poe wins free. In a moment, Finn’s been spun and his back pressed against the glass, his pants pulled down over his ass, down to his ankles. He kicks one leg off so he can spread his stance, so Poe can spread his hands along the thick insides of his thighs, so Poe can get close and low and take one of Finn’s balls in his mouth, so gentle, so urgent. He tugs, and Finn feels everything in his body go low and tight. He gets a hand in the curls of Poe’s hair and tightens his fist, hears Poe groan.

Then he’s a whirlwind. He’s a hand wrapped around the base of Finn’s cock, anchoring and vital, edging on painful. He’s lips chasing Finn’s foreskin up and down. He’s that hot, unselfconscious tongue lapping and curling. He’s drooling, he’s moaning, he’s gulping Finn deeper and reaching around to knead Finn’s ass, to trip two fingertips across the heat of Finn’s hot and yearning hole. Finn feels his thighs and belly tremble, he feels himself sob, he hears the obscene, wet noise of Poe’s mouth on him. Poe’s eyes are closed, his head is bobbing fast, and Finn feels too full for his skin. Tears form at the corners of his eyes.

He pulls back hard on Poe’s hair and comes. Hits the roof of Poe’s mouth, then his cheek, then his chin, then Poe’s chasing him, earnest wrinkle between his brows, catching the final, lingering crests of Finn’s orgasm that seem to just last and last against the softness of his lips and the gentling of his tongue.

Finn drops his forehead to the glass window, tries to breathe, says “fuck” a couple dozen times. Poe’s panting. He places light kisses down the runnels of Finn’s hips, left then right, then he falls back on his heels.

Finn feels the pull of gravity in the sight of Poe pressing the heel of his hand into the tight-tented front of his pants. He’s starving, he thinks. He’s parched. He’s been plenty hungry in his life, but never so in need. The seriousness in Poe’s face as he watches Finn watch him. The shakes that keep catching up to Finn in his knees.

The plan is to let his knees buckle, to take Poe by the wrists and spread him across the cream white floor. To get his hip between Poe’s thighs and rut against him, slide against him, to get his mouth on his skin, sink his teeth in. To be allowed this, for the moment.

But the door chimes an arrival.

 

Finn’s cock is soft and sensitive and stuffed hastily into his pants. He’s sticky and sweating and he smells, he can smell it on himself, he smells of Poe’s mouth. He’s sitting across from Senator Leia Organa, crown princess of vanished Alderann, hero of the old Rebellion, mother of the new Jedi Order. He’s sweating. The three of them are arrayed across the room-- Poe lounging against the silent valachord, Finn and the Senator seated on low loungers. She’s laughing uproariously.

“You were such an obnoxious, raggedy little greeper of a kid,” she says to Poe, and Finn wishes he had the clarity of mind right now to picture such a thing.

“I lived in a storage closet on a Rebel base!”

“ _Converted_ storage closet!” she says, and Poe waves away the equivocation. “He was a sight,” she directs to Finn. “Always getting into scraps. Skinny little legs with skinned knees, mud in his hair, engine grease all over. The ground crew always had to double check before every take-off that he wasn’t stowed away inside a Y-Wing.”

Finn senses that he’s supposed to laugh, so he laughs, but there’s a bitter tint to the twinkle in Poe’s eyes, and Finn’s stomach sinks a little at the indistinct betrayal he’s stumbled into.

“Sounds...rough and tumble,” Finn offers.

“Both, often,” says Poe out the side of his mouth.

“To this day,” says the Senator. She leans forward, narrows her eyes at Poe. “You really are alright?”

“No worse for wear, better by the moment. Could’ve been worse, and I’ve got my hero here to thank for that.” He shoulders off the valachord and sinks down next to Finn, their hips a warm hand’s breadth apart.

“I do thank you for that,” she says.

“I didn’t,” Finn begins, then musters his confidence. “It was nothing. I’ve seen worse.”

“You must be somewhat rough and tumble yourself, young man,” she lifts an eyebrow. “If you’re used to worse than a clutch of Tol Kanett’s goons.”

Finn chokes on air.

“Tol-?”

“Kanett,” Poe supplies. “Hanger-on, low-life. Fascist, and aspiring autocrat.” He sneers. “Lobbyist.”

“Tol Kanett,” Finn says. “Human, light brown skin, dark eyes, long hair, wears a lot of purple? Voice like a kethriak marauder? But in kind of a sensual way?”

Poe and the Senator look back and forth at each other, at Finn.

“You know her,” Leia says. “Poe, who exactly is your new friend?”

Finn turns to Poe. He sees the cut above his eye where he’d been hit, the bruise under his jaw where he’d been kissed. The wariness in his expression. A fist tightens in Finn’s chest.

“She took me home last night,” Finn says. “She was at the club, she called me over. I didn’t know who she was.”

“Okay,” says Poe, as if it is.

“She was the first,” he says, and he doesn’t mean to. “I didn’t know she hurt people, that she’d hurt you.”

“You don’t have to explain yourself. You didn’t know. You didn’t know me,” Poe says, smiling slowly, as if he does now.

“You’ve been inside her home?” The Senator asks, and Finn realizes that his knee is touching Poe’s, that their space has become close. He clears his throat too loudly.

“Yes, I have, yeah, I’ve been in there. It’s,” he gestures out the window to the east, “Out in the Senate District, a long way off.”

“Finn, may I call you Finn?” He nods, embarrassed at the prospect of telling this woman his designation. “You’ve done me one great favor, saving this man’s life. I wonder if I might trouble you for another.”

And this is Leia Organa, without whom he would have found himself in skeletal white armor, knowing only death. And though he yearns for it, some days, for the cocooning familiarity of the creche ship, and the promise of a purpose, a place to belong, still, without Leia Organa, he might never have danced, or been Finn. This is Leia Organa, who had been at Endor.

“What can I do?” he asks.

“Do you think you could get us back inside Tol Kanett’s home?”

 

The Senator calls a meeting of “our nascent resistance”. _What are we resisting?_ Finn whispers to Poe while she’s sending the message. _That’s complicated,_ he gets back. _But, to put it briefly: the Republic. The people who keep you underground._ And Finn says, _Of course_ , and Finn thinks, _Aw, shit._

People trickle into the apartment. Not many, and nondescript, for a bunch of traitors and the odd mutineer. A quiet Togruta man with complicated silverwork twined about his lekku. A trio of humans who arrive together, who Poe greets warmly, and who pour themselves generous glasses of currant wine. A diminutive Sullustan in Republican fleet greens, a debonair Rodian with a bow-legged step. And finally, by holo-transmitter, a Mon Calamari who even Finn recognizes: Grand Admiral Ackbar, who has eyes only for the Senator. His voice comes to them tinny and distant.

“Senator Organa, with all respect to young Dameron, can we trust the source of this intelligence?”

“Why wouldn’t we?” Poe says.

“Why would we?” says Jess Pava, one of the humans. She gestures to Finn. “This could obviously be a trap.”

“You think I’m that easily taken in?”

“By a pretty face? Sure.”

“I’m right here,” Finn says, and is immediately spoken over by the swaggering Rodian.

“So we go in small,” he says. “Just me, no comms, nothing to trace back. If I don’t come out, you know it was a set-up.”

“It’s not a set-up!” Finn tries. Poe’s hand lands on his shoulder, but slides off in a moment. Finn waits, he waits for Poe to bring up who FN is, where he comes from. To leverage that information. Moment to moment, it doesn’t happen.

“I won’t send you anywhere without backup, Ksalak, so save us all some time and stop suggesting it.” Senator Organa pinches the bridge of her nose before forging on. “Mister Dameron has vouched for Finn, and I have decided to trust his judgement. Do you trust mine?”

It takes them the better part of an hour to answer. By the time a plan is hatched and set for two nights hence, morning is threatening the sky with golden daggers of light that cut across the skyline and shatter against the spire windows. The visitors slip out in a practiced staggered fashion. The Senator is last.

“We will be in your debt,” she says to Finn as she goes.

And oh, the things that could mean for him. His old job back, or a better job, maybe off the floor, maybe a foreman. A spot in a boarding house a couple levels up. Tickets to the gravcar races with decent seats and view of the drivers, a view of Poe grinning at the crowd, grinning at him. Two hot meals a day, a new pair of boots, a chip away at the debts he’s in.

He’s by the door, caught in the dream, when Poe presses a small, heavy purse of credits into his hand.

“For earlier,” he says. “For your time.”

Finn remembers how he got here. Poe retreats into the ‘fresher.

When FN was a young boy, after the Empire and before the factory, he lived for a brief while in a home on Garos IV. The local university had taken on the task of tracking down the families of Imperial orphans like him. He remembers the administrator, a human with red hair and probably too little funding, who came around personally to inform every child whose parents had been found. FN wanted, more than anything, to win her regard. She smiled at other children, she patted their heads when she passed, she told them, yes, we’re close, perhaps soon. Bit by bit, she led them away and left him more and more alone. About a year into its operation, it was uncovered that the majority of children were being sold off to slavers and organ farmers. When the Social Welfare Bureau’s ancient transport dropped him off under the surface of Coruscant, they welcomed him as _one of the lucky ones_. Then they found a machine small enough for him to work.

And this is what luck means, in his life: the privilege of drinking the dregs. A handful of credits and the memory of one good, confusing night.

He should leave.

Something happens to the lights. They dim, then go out. Dawn takes over the room, picks out the gold detailing at the edges of the space and the stitches of the furniture. The decanter of Lothalian currant wine, much drained, refracts a beam of morning light into a fractured star, paints a galaxy on the walls.

He’s at the window again, he can’t stop himself. The spires are near and they are far, they trickle towards the horizon, they rise to pierce the sky. He raises his hand to the glass. He feels spun out like so much starlight. As if he could reach out and prick his finger on the sharp peak of a tower.

“You’re here.”

Finn turns.

“I can go.”

“Do you want to?”

“Not much.”

“That’s good. I’m glad. Don’t.”

Poe joins him at the window. He’s as sculpted and distant as any high corner of the city. Only for a second, then he exhales, slumps, rests a hand on the inside of Finn’s elbow, as if for support. He slants a smile.

“I should tell you something about myself. The reason I’m with this Resistance, and why those thugs came at me in the club, and why I wanted you, why I want you here.” Poe watches the skyline and Finn watches Poe. “There’s all this. All of this, the grandeur, the money, the city, the world. I want more. I always want more. There’s got to be more.” His hand tightens on Finn. “Do you know what I mean?”

Finn, sleepy and bold, turns and ducks so that he can speak close into Poe’s ear.

“I woke up underground yesterday. Now we’re here. There’s more.” He smiles right up against Poe’s cheek. “There’s so much more.”


End file.
